The entrance to the dungeon’s third floor was a giant metal lattice backed by the more traditional wooden doors. To me, it looked as though the floor would have a fortress or siege theme, judging purely by the drawbridge aesthetic of the entrance. However, when we activated the door, only the wood doors behind the lattice swung open while the gate itself remained shut. Bright light streamed through the thick metal frame barring our entry, and we could hear a massive amount of people yelling, screaming and…cheering? Were they cheering? The three of us looked at each other and shrugged before stepping up to the lattice to see what all the ruckus was about.
Looking through the oversized iron frame, we watched as two combatants tried to murder each other inside of a gigantic arena. The crowd of spectral spectators roared their approval as one of the combatants literally lost his head, showering the sandy floor of the battlefield with crimson mist. The surviving gladiator raised his weapons skyward and let out a ferocious, bellowing roar of victory. That struck me as odd, not because he was celebrating a hard-fought battle, but because there was a sky for him to raise his weapons toward in the first place. Why could I clearly see the sky inside of a dungeon? The sun was beating down on the colosseum. I could feel the heat of it radiating from the sand in front of our gate. I could see the clouds in the distance and smell a hint of petrichor in the air; but we had been traveling in a downward spiral into the guts of the mountain range for the entire time we’d been inside the dungeon. The logistics of it baffled me so completely, I decided it was probably not worth thinking about. The raucous crowd suddenly turned silent and a loud, commanding voice rang out:
“Congratulations to our victor, Carnilius! He fought valiantly, did he not?”
The crowd roared in agreement. The speaker waited for the din to die down a bit before continuing.
“Indeed! Now, as he returns to his ludus to receive the rewards of his triumph, let us welcome our next combatants! The upcoming bout is a team deathmatch, pitting the hordes of the far-flung Borvho Barrens against our would-be champions! Let us first greet our heroes!”
The gate before us creaked and groaned in protest against its own weight before it finally opened vertically before us. The spectral audience was losing its collective mind as we tentatively stepped out onto the sands of the arena. Once we were fully through the entrance, the heavy metal gate closed once more.
“Three heroes, from lands unknown, once sought to quell the undead uprising in dreadful Borvho! Alas, their tragic failure led to the Barrens being overrun and left to the ghoulish hordes to this very day! Will these three heroes fare any better?”
The announcer awaited his answer and received a raucous mixture of boos and cheers.
“It appears the crowd is divided! Well, let us wait no longer to receive our answer! Bring out the dead!!”
There was a thunderclap so cacophonous I thought for a moment that someone had set off a bomb in the stands, but then it happened again and a giant bolt of lightning seared the sky before slamming directly into the center of the arena floor. I readied both my weapons, and the stoat leapt from my breast pocket with a hiss. It clambered up to my shoulder, awaiting the incoming enemies. Remnant electrical currents zapped here and there from the scorched earth. Juniper and Shrek both took up their positions at my three and nine o’clock. It dawned on me in that moment that this was really the only maneuver we had in our arsenal. If we were going to fight together like this more than just the one time, we’d need to work on our battle strategies.
A familiar groaning sound arose from the sand as hundreds of undead hands sprouted from the ground and I suddenly felt like we were trapped inside of the world’s worst raised garden bed. As soon as the first undead managed to get half of its body up out of the sand, I used Threat Assessment to get a read on what we were dealing with.
The good news was that, if this wight was an indicator, the horde was all around the same level as Shrek and me. The bad news was, there appeared to be at least a hundred of the bastards. Shrek, for his part, was unwilling to wait for the undead to clamber fully out of the ground. He was busy at work chopping at them with his axe like he was playing live action whack-a-mole. I liked the initiative, but I worried that he might get himself in too deep and we wouldn’t be able to help in time. My mind raced to decipher The System’s weakness evaluations. I didn’t have any holy relics, or candles, and the shampoo thing was clearly a gag because evidently even an almighty AI can be an idiot. Then it hit me and I realized that if anyone was an idiot, it was me. I turned my head to the stoat and gave it a single instruction:
“Light ‘em up.”
It wasted no time in leaping from my shoulder and streaking across the battlefield. About halfway between me and the undead, the little cutey caught fire and sped up even more. A brilliant trail of flame followed behind it as it zoomed through the undead like a tiny comet, setting several wights on fire as it passed by. An idea occurred to me as I watched the stoat zig and zag through the crowd and I let out a loud whistle. The stoat stopped in its tracks, its ears perked and twitching.
“Come back!” was the only command the stoat needed. It shot toward me with blinding speed, knocking several wights up into the air with just the shockwave it left in its wake. It extinguished its fire as it scrambled back up to my shoulder. I sent a message to Juniper who had somehow been blasting fire from her new gauntlet, taking a cue from the stoat. The plan was, I’d target enemies with Exploit Weakness. The stoat and Juniper would attack those enemies with fire, being that was one of the wights’ primary weaknesses, and we’d see if it did anything. If so, we had a whole undead legion to barbecue. I picked out one of the undead near Juniper and hit it with Exploit Weakness, then directed her on which enemy to target. She hit it with the same fire attack she’d been using on his comrades, however this time the attack landed with much higher efficacy. The wight was turned to ash almost instantly. I smiled at the success of the plan, then cocked my head as I got an achievement.
Fat chance of that happening, I thought. If it worked, it worked. I wasn’t about to stop using the abilities The System had given me in ways that were clearly effective and logical. In fact, I was going to do the opposite. Right then and there. I marked another target and then tried to mark another, simultaneously. The System didn’t want to allow it on an individual basis, but I found that if I zoomed out I could mark the entire horde as a single entity and the debuff applied to every individual in the horde. I gave the command to the stoat before The System could negate the effect and it leapt back into action. The little fire floof absolutely decimated the ranks of the undead with its attack, which I fully intended to dub “Chardasher”.
Shrek came over to stand beside me as we watched the stoat and Juniper fully destroy the entire undead army in roughly a minute and a half. I was receiving kill notification after kill notification and several achievements in a row for buffing allies and assisting in kills. The amount of XP I was receiving from all their hard work was honestly a bit insane.
“You’re taking all the fun out of this, you know,” Shrek said. “And that self-satisfied grin of yours isn’t helping.”
“What can I say? Ya gotta love it when a plan comes together.”
“Not when it leaves me just standing around looking like an idiot with nothing better to do.”
“I mean, that’s all I’m doing,” I said.
“I rest my case,” he grumbled.
“Look at that!” the announcer shouted. “They cleared the entire horde in less than three minutes, total! That’s an all-time record!”
The crowd was uproarious. Spectral roses rained down upon us as we stood among the embers of the disglorious dead. I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, despite all the cheering and fanfare. Something told me we weren’t done. The announcer confirmed my suspicions.
“It was so fast that I think we all deserve a round two, don’t you agree? This time around, we won’t underestimate our heroes, though. We’re pitting them against the three undead generals that killed those heroes of yore! But, since we want this to be a fair contest, we will offer our heroes a choice. Will it be trio vs trio combat, or is one of you brave enough to face the Revenant Champion Gauntlet? What’ll it be, heroes?”
I was about to argue that we should face them as a team. They likely had the same weakness to fire as the wights, which would give us a huge advantage. Shrek, however, had a different idea.
“Let me do it,” he said, his head lowered. “Let me take on the gauntlet.”
“What?” Juniper said incredulously. “No way! We got here together, we can beat them together.”
“It’s not about the party, this time,” he argued. “I was never able to finish the council’s proving quest. If I don’t find something in this dungeon that I can claim as a solo accomplishment, they may never take me seriously. They certainly wouldn’t allow me to join the orcs’ adventuring guild, much less join raids. If I don’t do this, I will never be a true orc warrior.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Juniper insisted.
“It’s all going to be dangerous,” he said. “It’s a dungeon, not a petting zoo.”
He turned to me then and asked what I thought.
“I agree with Juniper. It’s reckless and dangerous. There has to be some other way to get you what you need for the Council.”
He shook his head, then raised his eyes to meet mine.
“No. THIS is the way. Please. Just…give me this one thing. You owe me.”
I was about to reply, to argue further that we should go at it together as a team…but I stopped short. He was right. It was my fault he never finished his proving quest, even if it was purely accidental on my part. I did owe him. More than that, I was beginning to get the distinct impression that he wasn’t just trying to get the approval of the Council, but to prove something to Jasmine…and possibly to himself. I let out a long breath.
“Alright, Shrek. If that’s the way you want it, we’ll let you handle it.”
“No! Rocky, we can’t just let him go out there alone!” Juniper admonished.
“I won’t be alone. Not really. You two will be here with me, if I fall. If that happens, carry my axe back to Mother and tell her I died a warrior’s death.”
He didn’t give us a chance to reply. There was no further discussion to be had. So he simply turned back to face the announcer and raised his axe.
“I am Vrk’shryk Irontusk of Slagfall! I, son of Uz’shryk Irontusk, accept your challenge!”
Juniper and I were immediately teleported to the inside of one of the holding pens that lined the colosseum walls. We pressed ourselves against the iron bars separating us from the arena and watched helplessly as Shrek’s first opponent materialized. The announcer introduced him as Oxfa, The Unseen. The revenant was huge, even in comparison to Shrek, and carried a massive broadsword in each hand. A long, tattered cloak flapped against his back fanning the gray, dusky smoke that seemed to flow off of his body. His face was obscured by a grotesque black helmet. The first of three opponents, and it looked more dangerous than anything we had faced in the dungeon so far – with the possible exception of the Forge Wraith. I was suddenly very, very worried for Shrek’s chances of pulling off a win against one of these devils, let alone three of them back to back.